AI as we currently know it is having an echo effect on social media platforms. Those who use social media and agencies who utilize social media for marketing purposes have become experimenters of AI real quick.
A survey (2023) provided the information on 51.8% of global influencers who started to use AI-assisted programs. Sure the use varies depending on the purpose, but the idea we believe is increasing productivity. Now this was before 46% of total workers started adapting at the end of 2024.
However, coming back to social media being a leading forefront for AI users, what is it that really interests people? Not just digital agencies, every person is eager to learn AI.
Whether you have a small business or work freelance for an enterprise level organization, AI is amazingly becoming helpful. We are not exaggerating; nearly 50% of adults in the United States are willing to learn how to use AI in social media marketing.
Now the change we are talking about is not how social media is influenced by AI towards particular extremes.
Instead, we are trying to focus on core marketing activities like:
These are the stages that have experienced tremendous transformations. You too must be trying to adopt AI and capitalize on the opportunities it presents.
But before you move on to using AI in social media marketing, here is a small guide helping to determine what’s wrong and right for you.
AI is enabling social media agencies to do more and social media is boosting AI’s popularity. This led to a chain of uprisings of the topic in early 2023. Clearly it really did get the celebrity treatment and became a hot topic of the year 2024.
Between these two parallels, there’s you trying to figure out where to start. How about understanding the role of AI in SMM (social media marketing)?
Source: Leading benefits of using generative AI
for social media marketing worldwide (May 2024)
- Social Sentiment Analysis:
Your brand needs to be aware of your audience’s sentiment. This helps you to be vocal the correct way. Strategizing a response or a feedback on various channels is complex for a brand. AI plays an important role in both understanding the audience and providing a convincing response.
To identify sentiments effectively, analyzing reviews by people is one of the most reliable approaches, as they offer genuine insights into audience perceptions. Various tools, such as SocialPilot Reviews are available to support this process.
These tools can help streamline sentiment analysis, making it easier for your brand to craft thoughtful and impactful responses.
- Ad Optimization:
Let us get one thing straight; every marketing expert in your team will agree ad optimization for social media platforms is a very compounded strategy.
- There are 3-5 primary areas of expertise.
- 7-8 advertising categories.
- More than 8-10 points for strategy focus for each platform
- Around 20+ optimization metrics.
- And after all this you still get stuck at technical aspects.
But let’s take a deep breadth and focus on positives here. Even the various LLLMs you are using everyday can help you.
They can answer your questions about optimization, suggest better approaches, and help your product reach a sustaining phase. Even the development hints at one point AI has the ability to automate the entire process with AI agents as shown for .
- Content Creation & Curation:
Consistent content generation to keep your accounts afloat becomes a challenge. You might contradict us here that content generation with AI is a bit of a gray area. It means you belong to 48% of respondents who avoid AI generated content on social media.
Let’s just keep our hands clear from the gray area and talk about a different approach. We will discuss all those approaches in great depth in the implementation process.
A hint; it’s leveraging AI as your assistance. It will answer the most obvious question “how to use AI in social media posts. Also remember content is king but your strategies and approaches are queen for social media marketing.
- Audience Insights & Personalization:
Learning about your audience is good, but providing them with the content they want is great. The two rules that are the most important factor of social media marketing are:
- Knowing your audience.
- Personalizing content accordingly.
Here AI tools and products help you to understand your audience. Sure the trick is easy to determine but to be efficient and justify those RICE scores is where AI comes in.
Once you have gathered information about your audience, allow helpful assistance to support your campaigns. At this point using AI to generate social media content leads you to productivity and efficiency.
- Influencer Marketing:
Finding influencers and agencies offering influencer marketing service in 2024 is like a piece of cake. More than half of the people living on the planet are either microvlogger, influencers, or community managers.
However the challenging part is finding out the right candidate to promote your product/services.
Learning about their audience, their content, perfectly amalgamating them with your content becomes extremely difficult. Using AI in your social media marketing strategies will allow you to overcome those obstacles conveniently.
In exploring AI’s current advancements and its role within the social media landscape, we observe its primary function is being an assistant. Across every facet of social media marketing, AI is predominantly deployed to provide support, enhance efficiency and boost productivity.
Going through each specific task from social media marketing using AI will be a bit tedious. Rather let’s separate AI users into groups of three.
- Tool Dependent
- Hybrid Practitioners
- Automation Specialists
Let’s have a look at them and learn about this group using examples.
- Tool Dependent
- Dependency Level: 100% reliance on AI tools.
Kyoko runs a local bakery in Japan and she uses:
- Canva AI to generate all images and banners for social media images.
- Copy.ai to write her wonderful captions and story about her customer experiences.
- Buffer AI for posting times.
- Instagram chatbot automated responses for customer services.
- Group’s Profile: Small business, solopreneurs, or beginning in social media marketing.
- Generic content feel
- Limited bran personality
- No Unique strategic approach
- Template dependent feel.
- Hybrid Practitioners
- Dependency Level: Strategic use of AI in social media marketing with enhancement-centric approach. The 70% + 20% + 10% model of collaborating with AI.
Marc and his team manages social media for fitness brands.
- Creates original content from workout concepts.
- Tailor a brand voice and strategy.
- Films authentic BTS for showcasing credibility & fun environment.
- Engages personally with the community through podcasts on various platforms.
- Marc uses Weam AI for content brainstorming, implementing strategies, and discussing copies, scripts, concepts together in an AI integrated collaborative space.
- An AI image enhancement tool for captivating graphics of UI/UX designers.
- Use AI tools to strategies targeted advertisement for every stage of buyers/clients journey.
- Process Optimization (10%)
- Fine tune prompts for better results or build a custom prompt library.
- Create a personalized workflow integrated with AI including multiple LLMs for various tasks.
- Make every AI tool and product learn about a brand’s unique voice for familiarity of content across every social media platform.
- Group’s Profile: Experiences social media managers, content creators, digital markers, agencies, team of digital marketing experts.
- Brainstorm ideas and concepts manually.
- Expand the ideas and concepts using AI.
- Create core social media strategies by yourself and use AI to review and become better.
- Optimize the strategy using AI products and review the adjustments for final touch.
- 70% of your workflow is dependent on your own skill. 20% of workflow efforts are dependent on AI products, lastly 10% is optimizing where AI suggests you or you vice versa. A simple yet effective approach eliminating drudgery and increasing workflow efficiency.
- Automation Specialists
- Dependency Level: 95% dependency on AI, i.e. Near complete automation through AI agents.
The entire e-commerce system is run by AI automation.
- Data and information gathered from a multiple source
- Automated content generation
- Customer response management
- Trend monitoring and adaptation
- Performance optimization
- A/B testing of social media content
- Budget allocation
- Cross-platform posting
- Profile: Large digital agencies, enterprise-level.
- Limitations: The automation needs management roles to supervise everything. It makes sure the output is expected and returns are considerably satisfactory.
| AI in Social Media Marketing | |||
| Types of Group | |||
| Aspect | Tool-Dependent | Hybrid Practitioners | Automation Specialists |
| Cost | Low-Medium | Medium-High | Very High |
| Time Investment | Low | High | Initial High, Then Low |
| Content Quality | Generic | High | Variable |
| Customization | Limited | Extensive | Programmatic |
| Brand Voice | Inconsistent | Strong | Systematized |
| Scalability | Limited | Moderate | Extensive |
| Personal Touch | Minimal | High | Automated Personalization |
| Learning Curve | Low | High | Very High |
When you look at it we are not trying to assert an answer on which group is better. Every group has to make decisions to select the working approach best suited for their specific criteria.
Remember, the most successful approaches often depend on the three specific criteria for example: specific needs, resources, and goals of the organization.
The reason for using AI is quite simple, one of the early features of AI was generating content. Which gave a quick hint at what was coming which is generative AI products and tools. The question is, “Are these big blocks of cheese digestible?” Do AI products have proven worthy of people’s investment?
It does depend on how to use AI for social media marketing, but let me remind you of your collective goal for a quick minute. Take the reference of the groups we have provided above. The range of benefits we are discussing does perfectly align with the groups mentioned above, your goals, and later developments.
- Efficiency & Productivity: Rapid generation of content like tweets, captions, responsive comments, etc saving time and allowing the team to focus on strategizing. Prompt libraries, custom bots, AI agents allow a smoother collaboration between teams as there is less complexity.
- Improve Content Strategy: Insights are a great way to understand audiences and refine your content strategy accordingly. With an helpful AI assistant supported by powerful LLM can be useful in seeking those insights. Using normal AI to predict trends is unclear as it requires large volumes of data.
- Creative Reference & Generation: Using AI to generate social media content is a bit of a gray area. However, considering AI’s suggestions as reference points can really kick start your work. On the other hand it can become an expert moderator. Based on successful past campaigns it can suggest amazing ideas and engaging concepts.
- Scalability: If you have digital agencies, you will understand the problem of scaling. Every day there is something new in social media marketing, and it needs research before fully committing to its implementation. AI makes scaling easy with AI-driven processes, handling larger volumes of work without proportional increases in costs.
- Easy Adoption & Innovation: Products that have easy adoption strategies are gems in social media marketing. They allow you to quickly learn the necessary, continue with innovative strategy, and grow with your demands.
- Data Privacy and Security: Social media managers must be vigilant about how data is collected, stored, and used. There are first-hand data source solutions available. On the other hand if you are trying to find a small group just create a survey with generative AI and share it among your communities
- Algorithm Bias: Don’t include tools or products in your tech-stack that have algorithm bias. If trained on skewed data, Gen AI can inadvertently perpetuate bias. Be aware of this risk associated with AI providers to ensure fair and unbiased algorithms.
- Integration with Existing Tools: If you are a manager, ensure that AI solutions complement existing workflows without causing disruptions. Also training and skill development is an important factor to understand effectively how to use AI in social media marketing.
- Measuring Effectiveness: Assessing the impact of AI on social media performance is not the only concern. Managers need to measure the success of you and your team using AI too. AI products and tools with robust analytical measuring features can help you with this concern.
- Cost Considerations: It’s important to evaluate the return on investment as investment in AI tools can be costly. Also a quick note: prioritize AI tools that align with strategic goals.
- Keeping Up with Rapid Changes: Social media managers must stay informed about the latest developments to effectively leverage AI. Allow us to make it easy!. You can always trust our articles about using AI in social media marketing to keep up with the rapid changes.
A year ago we were learning how social media is changing the way we do business. Jumping back to present we are discussing the development of AI in social media marketing. Must be the effect of the law of accelerated returns.
Anyway as you can see using AI is all about consistency, productivity, and efficiency. Along the lines of these core benefits you will find the ultimate goal of practicing the elimination of tedious work to create something innovative.
Do remember using ai to generate social media content is not about mass producing toxic digital waste. The fundamentals are to engage, interest, appreciate and sell. Whether you use AI or not the fundamentals of social media content must be respected.